While historians of the Civil War have touched on the topic in
the course of exploring other matters, they have paid little
attention to cowardice itself. In this, they are in good company.
The subject of cowardice has been honored mostly with evasion. No
scholar of any period has written a book devoted to it. A decade
ago, having already published books about humiliation and disgust,
William Ian Miller set out to complete a trilogy of studies of
human lowness with a book about cowardice. He found that he could
not do it. His intended subject “gave way,” he wrote; “that’s what
cowardice always does.” The book Miller did publish is titled
instead The Mystery of Courage.

This gap in the secondary literature results in part from a gap
in primary sources. Max Hastings writes that in his long career as
a military historian, “no U.S. or British regimental war diary that
I have ever seen explicitly admits that soldiers fled in panic, as
of course they sometimes do.” Richard Gabriel notes that “accounts
of past battles seem so often to offer examples of individual
heroism and courage and all too seldom report acts of cowardice and
fear.” As Virgil puts it in Dante’s Inferno, “The
world will let no fame of [cowards] endure,” and even he, the guide
through literature’s great tour of sin and baseness, says he does
not want to discuss the numberless cowards who dwell just inside
Hell’s gate. “Let us not talk of them,” he tells Dante.

Courage gets the press. Certainly this has been the case in
Civil War studies. In The Life of Johnny Reb, Bell
Wiley observed that “those who have written and talked about the
Confederate Army” have not had much to say about cowardice, it
“being a less gratifying subject than heroism.” The same holds true
of those who have written about the Union side. It is not only
because courage is more “gratifying” than cowardice that it draws
our attention: there is also a consensus that during the Civil War
courage was much more common than cowardice. I have no wish to
contest this view. Courageous acts were no doubt more common than
cowardly ones, and we are naturally interested in exploring what
the war was over, what soldiers fought for, and what they aspired
to. Cause and comrades, states’ rights, and slavery all deserve the
focus they receive, as do the other demographic, economic, social,
and political factors that shaped the conflict.

But there was also something beneath or behind the war, in the
backs of men’s minds, driving them forward—or at least keeping them
from fleeing. The combat theorist S. L. A. Marshall noted that most
men feel fear on the battlefield, but also that they “are commonly
loath that their fear will be expressed in specific acts which
their comrades will recognize as cowardice. The majority are
unwilling to take extraordinary risks and do not aspire to a hero’s
role, but they are equally unwilling that they should be considered
the least worthy among those present.” Certainly this was true of
the American Civil War. During battle, it was not ideology or a
desire for glory that made men attack a fortification or hold their
position when under assault. “The force that compelled them,” as
Bell Wiley put it, “above all else, was the thought of family and
friends and the unwillingness to be branded cowards.” They worried
about cowardice more than they aspired to courage, and this worry
seemed to root more deeply in them than aspiration did. When
soldiers measured themselves in battle, Gerald Linderman observes,
“negative results brought damnation (‘Was I to run and prove myself
a coward?’) much more readily than positive results brought
certainty to oneself or others that one was a soldier of
courage.”

In fact, cowardice and courage seem to have a kind of
synergistic relationship, even to the point that the former could
be said to cause the latter. Union soldier Jonathan Stowe recalled
charging “forward with a rush lest your pride
taunt you of cowardice.” In his study of the motivation of
Civil War soldiers, James M. McPherson observes...

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